Two weeks ago was our first time to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival. A time for spending time with family and --yes-- giving, receiving, and eating moon cakes.
One of the things you may notice is that the packaging on the moon cakes is quite fancy. Some friends have told us that, when giving moon cakes, sometimes the packaging and the brand name are more important than the taste of the actual pastry.
Being intimidated by the moon cake giving
tradition, Rachel and I decided to break tradition and bake cookies for
our friends and neighbors (while reducing the sugar in the recipe to
make them more Chinese-friendly). We can do this only because we are
foreigners, but locals are bound by the giving of moon cakes.
The thing is, once you give gifts around Mid-Autumn Festival, you may receive gifts in return. These are all from our neighbors and friends (most in response to our cookie gift)!
This box was really fancy (and we are sure probably not cheap either... we're hoping it was a re-gift)!
,
More moon cakes in the mail from friends!
While we have made a good dent in this stack, we have not finished them yet... and I am not sure whether, culturally, that is a problem or not.
So what is a moon cake, you ask? It is basically a round pastry with some filling. Sometimes flaky, sometimes softer, sometimes sweet, sometimes salty.
Most common so far has been red or green bean filling (a sweet filling
of pureed beans... it is actually pretty good). We have also seen meat,
coconut, lotus root, chocolate, and sweet milk fillings (not all of these were equally well-received by our taste buds).
This particular cake was coconut filled and quite tasty. :-)
Happy Mid-Autumn Festival (aka Moon Cake Mayhem)!!
中秋节快乐!!
